Academics From The United States

"Young kids have wider circles of concern than adults. Adults expect people to enjoy the misfortune of groups they dislike. But 3-5-year-olds expect people to care about everyone's suffering. Compassion is an instinct—we don't have to learn it. We need to stop unlearning it."

"Authenticity without boundaries is careless. Authenticity without empathy is selfish."

"Think like a scientist: treat your opinions as hypotheses and decisions as experiments."

"I don’t think there’s any skill more critical for success than resilience...I think about resilience as the speed and strength of your response to adversity."

"Publication of my commentary in the Communications from Readers section might be one way for The American Cartographer to affirm a commitment to openness, and to demonstrate once again that efforts to stifle dissenting opinion tend to backfire."

"Although cartographic journals have been rigorously reviewing software for nearly a decade, the profession today seems as powerless against stupidly designed software as it was against the flagrant misuse of the Mercator projection."

"Whenever a map of count data makes sense, perhaps to place a map of rates in perspective, graphic theory condemns using a choropleth map because its ink (or toner) metaphor is misleading."

"I have made no secret that I am stepping down principally because of a strong disagreement with those now in control of ACSM over the importance to the profession of federal personnel qualifications standards which recognize the value of a comprehensive cartographic education to those accepting the title and responsibilities of Cartographer. But I have few regrets for having worked with The American Cartographer since 1977...."

"Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or screen, a map must distort reality."

"Such a critique seems trivial insofar as it's the situation that makes a technology good or bad. Plumbing is good when it solves an otherwise messy public health problem, for instance, and bad when it facilitates Nazi gas chambers. Of course, we need to critique the use of geospatial technologies. And we also need to critique the critique of geospatial technology."

"No one can use maps or make maps safely and effectively without understanding map scales, map projections, and map symbols."

"Nowadays, when I confess to being skeptical about theory, I'm especially concerned that proponents of social criticism of cartography don't really seem to be very committed to communication. They litter their essays with elitist language, which I don't think takes anybody, except maybe them, further down the road toward understanding."

"Has cartography become GIS? It's a moot point. I guess a lot of people in the GIS arena wouldn't agree that what they are doing is cartography. There's also the annoying tendency among academics to rename things, as occurred when we went from geographic information systems to geographic information science, to geospatial technologies, a term that acknowledges that the important role of GPS and what's called `location-based services'. If you look beyond GIS, you'll see a wider enterprise in which GIS as we know it now (mostly buffering and map overlay) is a relatively small part of macrocartography. But I don't have a crystal ball."

"“A final caveat: because this book is intended for general readers, academic geographers will notice little reference here to poststructural critical theorists, who’ve said much about maps in recent years but little about toponyms. Simply put, I’ve not found their work particularly useful, especially when tedious regurgitation of Foucault crowds out case studies and fosters gratuitous assumptions about power and impact.”"

"Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son."

"It is only when one ascends the mountains that the grand panorama is unfolded, and the book of nature is spread out, as it were, where an invitation is extended to all who will read."

"Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists."

"In 1979, the threats we faced were the Soviet Union, the socialism of 1970s liberals, and the predatory deviancy of cultural elites. Reagan defeated these beasts by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts. His approach to the Cold War? “We win and they lose." His economic agenda? The human dignity of work and its many rewards. His platform in the culture wars? The “community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.” This book—and Project 2025 as a whole—will arm the next conservative President with the same kind of strategic clarity, but for a new age."

"The Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank operated by many of Trump's current and former political allies — is leading the initiative. President Kevin Roberts once said the project's main goals are "institutionalizing Trumpism" and getting rid of unelected bureaucrats who he believes wield too much political influence."

"Yet students of history will note that, notwithstanding all those challenges, the late 1970s proved to be the moment when the political Right unified itself and the country and led the United States to historic political, economic, and global victories. The Heritage Foundation is proud to have played a small but pivotal role in that story. It was in early 1979—amid stagflation, gas lines, and the Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan, the nadir of Jimmy Carter’s days of malaise—that Heritage launched the Mandate for Leadership project. We brought together hundreds of conservative scholars and academics across the conservative movement. Together, this team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more than 2,000 conservative policies to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction. It was a promise from the conservative movement to the country—confident, specific, and clear. Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981—the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency. By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War. The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again."

"This is the duty history has put before us and the standard by which our generation of conservatives will be judged. And we should not want it any other way. The legacy of Mandate for Leadership, and indeed of the entire Reagan Revolution, is that if conservatives want to save the country, we need a bold and courageous plan. This book is the first step in that plan."

"In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We're in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be despairing. No one should be discouraged. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail. Number two, to the point of the clips and, of course, your preview of the fact that I am an early American historian and love the Constitution. That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons. But I would go to Federalist No. 70. If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton's No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive. You know, former congressman, the importance of Congress doing its job, but we also know the importance of the executive being able to do his job. And can you imagine, Dave Brat, any president, put politics off to the side, any president having to second guess, triple guess every decision they're making in their official capacity, you couldn't have the republic that you just described. But number three, let me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

"Forty-four years ago, the United States and the conservative movement were in dire straits. Both had been betrayed by the Washington establishment and were uncertain whom to trust. Both were internally splintered and strategically adrift. Worse still, at that moment of acute vulnerability and division, we found ourselves besieged by existential adversaries, foreign and domestic. The late 1970s were by any measure a historic low point for America and the political coalition dedicated to preserving its unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom. Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril."

"Personally, I feel that when your narrative about the future includes the phrase “and then a miracle happens,” you’re in trouble."

"Тhey [Romans] were forced to debase the currency. Debasing the currency for them was the same as borrowing is for us. It basically shifts the cost of solving your problems on to the future. Now, you can do that if the future doesn’t have any problems of its own. And we know that never happens, right? So the future has to deal with its own problems plus the cost of the past problems that you’ve deferred the cost of."

"...Tainter doesn't show good judgement in his choice of information about China, nor does he display a very sound historical instinct of his own. The working historian needs at least one of those virtues."

"In talking about sustainability I like to use a metaphor of sport, of a game. When you are in a sustainability exercise it is possible to lose. You can be unsustainable. But the converse doesn't hold. There is no point at which you can say that you have won. Sustainability consists of staying in the game; that is, continuing with the ability to solve problems. It is like a dance where you must be constantly in motion. There is no point where you can rest and say "Aha! We are sustainable!" It is something that always requires adjustment."

"“As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”"

"[T]his is , and it posits several forces that drive social instability and political violence. ...I'll focus on two main ones. ...First ... potential ...based on popular immiseration resulting from the decreased living standards for the majority of the population... This is a fairly obvious effect of growing inequality... Since the days of Malthus this... force has been much in discussion."

"[T]he second condition... is absolutely much more predictive of immediate troubles to come, and that's intraelite competition which results... when elite numbers increase relative to the general population. As a result... we have too many elite aspirants vying for a limited number of positions... causes... intraelite competition, eventually conflict, and that... in our analysis of about 100... cases of past societies sliding into crisis and then out... That turns out to be the most universal and most important force."

"[T]here are other dimensions. The state fragility and international environment, especially for smaller countries, international environment plays quite a role, but I will focus on the first two."

"was proposed 30 years ago. Although it was successively refined by other theorists... the theoretical core, and especially the emphasis on intra-elite competition and conflict as the most important driver of socio-political instability and state breakdown, remained constant. Over the past three decades, the theory was empirically tested by a growing number of researchers. Currently, there are detailed investigations of at least twenty crises... to test the predictions of the theory... [T]here are several dozen other less detailed examples. The... verdict is that.. predictions are well supported by data. ...[R]ival theories are not supported."

"[T]he "crude" Malthusian explanation, which connects popular immiseration to social breakdown, fails to account both for the start and end of the "Time of Troubles.""

"Many of the historical "Golden Ages" were... golden... only for the elites, whose high levels of consumption were based on low real wages and falling consumption levels of the great majority..."

"[S]ocieties have arrived at this crossroads before, and though... most of the time...the road has led to great loss of life and societal breakdown, sometimes it has led to a far happier resolution ..."

"The main question... Whether there is economic inequality, and social and political instability? Growing economic inequality, especially inequality in income and wealth, is currently a broadly shared concern. It has been a lot of the topics in the Davos meetings... and it is often adduced that growing inequality is a source of political discord. But is it? And if it's the case, how does it do it? What is the direct mechanism?"

"[I]nequality is an excellent proxy for the actual mechanisms that drive instability, but the actual drivers... are several, of which I will focus on two: popular immiseration and . ...[A]t a deep structural level the force that drives those and ultimately instability, is what I would refer to as the "wealth pump.""

"I'll use the example of the United States, which I have studied from inside out... over the past 20 years, and I will illustrate how these few forces... have laid out in real life... a particular example..."

"[W]hen a state... has stagnating or declining ... a growing gap between the rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt... Historically such developments have served as leading indicators of political instability. In the United States all of these... started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to... around 2020... a spike in political instability. And here we are."

"[T]here are some reasons to doubt that growing inequality might be a direct mechanism... of instability, because humans are very bad at perceiving inequality. ...[A] number of studies ...show that people, when... asked to estimate the degree of income or wealth inequality... their opinions essentially have nothing to do with what is actually... measured by economists."

"Let me go back to 2010 when Nature, the journal... asked a number of scientists to make some forecasts for the next decade... (2010-2020) and that's when I published the forecast that.., the growing political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade. ...10 years later ...together with my coauthor, , we have revisited this forecast to see whether it had anything to do with reality, and... this is one of the graphs... We looked at several measures of instability, one was anti-government demonstrations. A very similar picture shows up when you look at violent riots. And so we submitted this paper in early 2020 saying that this forecast was actually right... [A]s the paper was [under] review, the summer of 2020, the riots following the death of George Floyd have exploded and... in January of 2021 we had the shocking event... known as the Storming of the Capitol."

"... uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record... as Big Data. It employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions..."

"[T]he... forecast: “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe” ...was not simply a projection of the current trend in social instability into the future. ...[T]he basis for this forecast was a quantitative model that took as inputs the major SD drivers for instability (immiseration, intraelite competition, and state (in)capacity) and translated them into the Political Stress Indicator (PSI)... strongly correlated with socio-political instability. The rising curve of the... PSI... suggests a growing future socio-political instability."

"[C]omplex human societies at base and at some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles."

"The SDT proposes that the causes of revolutions and major rebellions are... similar to processes that cause earthquakes. In both... it is useful to distinguish "pressures" (structural conditions, which build up slowly) from "triggers" (sudden releasing events, which immediately precede a social or geological eruption)."

"... was proposed by and further developed and tested by... investigators, including [S.] Nefedov, Turchin, [and] Korotayev et al."

"Specific triggers... are difficult, perhaps... impossible to predict. ...[S]tructural pressures build up slowly and more predictably, and are amenable to analysis and forecasting."

"(SDT) offers a... wholistic framework for investigating such... forces that... lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of socio-political instability."

"[G]rowing socio-political instability results from multiple interacting factors: economic, political, and cultural."

"SDT can be... an explicit computational model capable of forecasting future... social unrest and political violence in specific social systems."